It would be neither possible nor advisable for those who work in universities and colleges to seriously digest all of these diatribes. Professors and administrators are easy targets, and deserve a certain amount of sympathy for unfairly being the whipping boy for every would-be social critic.
Many of these attacks cannot be true, for the simple reason that they are mutually exclusive: students allegedly read too much Shakespeare and too little; professors are overpaid and underpaid; campuses are too luxurious and too spartan.
The bewildered reader must then decide which, if any, of these recriminations might be true. How will the reader decide which condemnations to take seriously? Tom Nichols, who himself works in a post-secondary educational institution, writes:
Bashing colleges and universities is an American tradition, as is bashing the faculty, like me, who teach in them. Stereotypes abound, including the stuffy (or radical, or irrelevant) professor in front of a collection of bored children who themselves came to campus for any number of activities except education. “College boy” was once a zinger aimed by older people at young men, with the clear implication that education was no substitute for maturity or wisdom.
If a professor, or a curriculum, is judged to be stuffy, irrelevant, or boring, then it should be noted first that such a judgment is mere subjective taste, and second that such a judgment may itself be irrelevant.
No professor or administrator would claim that her or his university is perfect; to the contrary, many of the attacks on the university come from within. Those who work there are all too aware of the dysfunctional bureaucracies which manage them.
Like most post-secondary educators, Tom Nichols freely admits that “colleges are screwed up.” This, in turn, leads to another problem: “fewer people respect learning and expertise.” Two factors lead to a suspicion of the university: its actual flaws and its perceived flaws.
The critique of the university, and distrust of a university education, cannot simply be dismissed as anti-intellectualism, because these attacks are often leveled by the staff and teaching faculty of universities, who are less likely to be anti-intellectuals.
To some extent, the institutions of higher education have brought these problems upon themselves, because “colleges and universities paradoxically became an important part of that problem.”
The twenty-first century university is, then, a mixture of good and evil, a mixture of excellence and incompetence, and a mixture of things both valuable and worthless. A student who receives and follows wise counsel can obtain skills, obtain knowledge, and foster the life of the mind. That same wise counsel can help the student avoid the departments and curricula which are worthless and even harmful.
The university can still be intellectually stimulating, if a student avoids social justice movements. The university can still spark imaginative creativity through academic rigor, if a student steers clear of political correctness. For this reason, Tom Nichols can remain positive about the institution:
I say this while remaining a defender of the American university system, including the much-maligned liberal arts. I am personally a beneficiary of wider access to higher education in the twentieth century and the social mobility it provided. The record of these institutions is unarguable: universities in the United States are still the leading intellectual powerhouses in the world. I continue to have faith in the ability of America’s postsecondary schools to produce both knowledge and knowledgeable citizens.
The good news is that, if students search carefully at a contemporary university, they can still read the writings of Aristotle, Parmenides, Ockham, John Locke, Arthur Schopenhauer, Edmund Burke, Annette von Droste-Hülshoff, Raymond Chandler, and other authors. Students can still see works by Albrecht Dürer, Caspar David Friedrich, Martin Schongauer, George Grosz, Max Ernst, Käthe Kollwitz, and other artists. Students can still hear the music of Johann Walther, J.S. Bach, Arnold Schönberg, and other composers.
Beyond the gathering of such knowledge, which is a necessary precondition for reflection, students can, in certain select departments and courses, acquire and practice those critical thinking skills about which there is so much talk. The “knowing how” of critical thought is predicated upon the “knowing that” of data, evidence, or information.
It is still possible to avoid social justice mania - and, in the avoidance, encounter justice simpliciter.
Navigating between political correctness on the one side, and mere career training on the other, students can encounter a true life of the mind, despite the presence of a Bill Ayers or a Barack Obama.
